I only just joined and wanted to share these: Seriously chocolate-filled and very yummy, went away like hot cakes. I found the recipe on everything2.




Chocolate pecan cookies with gooey caramel centres
Supposed to give 48 cookies...mine must have been bigger


Ingredients

225g (1 cup) softened butter
225g (1 cup) white sugar
225g (1 cup) packed brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
115g (1/2 cup) flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
165g (3/4 cup) unsweetened cocoa powder
225g (1 cup) chopped pecans, preferably toasted
48 Rolos (small, chocolate covered caramels) or small caramel squares


Directions

1. (Optional, pecans do not need to be toasted) Heat oven to 180°C (350F). Place nuts in baking tin and toast for about 10 min (whole nuts) or 5 -6 min (chopped nuts). Shake well occasionally to prevent burning! Pull nuts out when golden brown, leave to cool completely.

2. Beat butter by hand or with mixer until creamy, mix in both sugars followed by eggs and vanilla.

3. Blend together flour, baking soda and cocoa in another bowl. Pour flour mixture into other bowl, mix until well combined. Stir in half of the pecans by hand.

4. Cover dough and place in fridge for 2h (keeps dough from melting in next step).

5. Divide chilled dough into 4 pieces (each = 12 cookies, work piece by piece and leave the others in the fridge). Take piece of dough and wrap fully arond Rolo / caramel square. Roll dough to ball, dip top in remaining pecans.

6. Repeat step 5 until all dough is used up, placing the cookies onto a well greased sheet as you go along (will prevent caramel from potentially sticking; chocolate covered cookies tend to stick less).

7. Bake cookies at 190°C (375F) for 8 - 9min. Cool on sheet for several minutes before gently removing. Let cookies cool out completely before storing them away (wax paper to prevent sticky mess).

8. Cookies are best warm, the cooled cookie caramel center will get harder and chewier. If necessary, reheat cookies in microwave for a couple of seconds to remelt the caramel - easy, caramel gets very hot very quickly!


Alternatives

- Substitute pecans for walnuts / peanuts or remove altogether
- Substitute peanut butter for caramel centres
- Leave out centre completely




Note: I'm not sure if it was for lack of power in my baking powder, but the cookies just kind of melted to blobs in the oven. Plus because there is a lot of chocolate in them, they were very dark, so...they looked like burnt blobs. That is why, next time, I think I'd try and make it more of a cake of a brownie-type recipe. Also, I didn't find any pecans so left them out, but I think it might be better with; maybe that is also the reason that my cookies just became melted blobs?! =P




Question to the maintainers of culinarydelight: I have my own recipe community (all kinds of recipes, not baking only - place_pigalle), and was looking to find others to affiliate. I'm not trying to promote my site here! I was thinking more along the lines of 'recipe exchange is good for all' Uhm. Whatever. Would you like to? I obviously would add you vice-versa =]